For one thing, she was negotiating the fact that sometimes she was speaking composed dialogue, other times reciting actual interviews, especially a 1966 interview Dylan did with Nat Hentoff in Playboy. “That’s why it was so tricky to play that scene, because it is from an interview,” Blanchett says. “But Dylan’s obviously riffing, finding that stuff in the moment. And it’s the difference between doing that, and also knowing that this is a reference to something that has already been said. So it was very difficult to play because you were constantly aware that you were in the immediacy of the moment but yet referencing primary, tertiary and secondary sources — the whole Dewey system was crashing in on me.”

Hentoff said he remembered the Dylan interview well, and that Dylan was indeed riffing that day.

It was actually the second interview he did with Dylan for Playboy magazine, Hentoff recalled. Having seen the first interview in galleys, Dylan called him up and said the editors changed his words, Hentoff said.

“I said ‘Well, don’t take that. Tell them that it won’t do and have them change the interview back.’ He said ‘No, we are gonna do another interview right now.’ I didn’t have a tape recorder ready so I just took notes for the next hour and a half, and he just improvised. And it went on to be a celebrated interview. He was wild that day.”

"More than any other contemporary African-American athlete, his ability to thrive in the pressure cooker of corporate America, while never making any embarrass­ing 'I’m not black, I’m universal' comments or selling his soul rather than just his visage, makes him a role model"

“Though his work for human rights is unassailable, the books grow worse and worse, the tales of his derring-do more and more farfetched. Finally, without at all forgiving him his lies, one feels sorry for Kosinski.”